The CogMedia Project: Open Data and Tools for Linking Cognitive Science and Mass Media

Abstract

Minds produce and consume news media. Because of this central relevance of minds, theories of mass media may be informed by the methods and measures of cognitive science. These measures could enhance understanding of the factors guiding news consumption habits. These measures could also help to explain how news themes accumulate collective attention. CogMedia is introduced here as an open resource for facilitating a connection between mind and mass communication. It contains hundreds of thousands of major headlines from large news media organizations, primarily in the United States. In addition, it has a set of open analysis tools for conducting quantitative analysis in R. This paper motivates CogMedia with background theoretical and empirical review. Theoretical discussion centers on complexity science as a framework for understanding mass-scale systems and the cognitive agents that underlie them. Following this background review and motivation, the paper introduces CogMedia, and illustrates potential quantitative analysis and data visualization using these open tools. Future empirical work is discussed, along with relevant theoretical implications.

Emergence of Covid‐19 as a Novel Concept Shifts Existing Semantic Spaces

“…But the communications measured on social media are not just output—they are also input, comprising part of the environment that subsequent social media users will rely on to further shift concept knowledge. That is, the relation between social media and its users is interactive in nature (Dale, 2020), and so these changes to conceptual knowledge are mutually reinforcing: one reason the effects might persist over time is because the way people communicate about the immediate implications of the pandemic then becomes the input for subsequent users during the iterative process of acquiring knowledge about concepts.…”